


Names and Fates

by Elsajeni



Category: Star Wars Legends: Thrawn Trilogy - Timothy Zahn, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, Inspired By Tumblr, Nemesis-Identifying Marks, Pre-Relationship, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-24
Updated: 2017-11-24
Packaged: 2019-02-06 08:04:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12813195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elsajeni/pseuds/Elsajeni
Summary: He's unfocused during the rest of the day's training, turning the name over in his mind. He's pretty certain he's never met anyone named Mara, but the name feels oddly familiar all the same, and he's trying to meditate but mostly racking his brain — a pilot in a different wing, maybe? A friend of a friend? A name he's caught in a Holonet broadcast, even? — when Yoda raps him on the shoulder with his cane and says sharply, "Distracted, you are."Inspired by a tumblr post:your enemy’s name on one wrist and your soulmate on the other. no clue which is which. hope it’s not the same name on both wrists.When the markings on Luke's wrists finally come in, one readsMara. The other readsJade.





	Names and Fates

Luke is fourteen when the markings on his left wrist come in — just a jumble of faint lines and curves at first, but over a few weeks they darken and shift, gradually fading into readability. _Jenth-aurek-dorn-esk_ , they read once they've settled: _JADE_. He keeps the letters covered at first, self-conscious, but after a few days of casting sidelong glances at the wristband he's wearing, Beru finally corners him in the kitchen and says, "I don't want to pry, but—"

"It's not anyone I know," Luke says, blushing fiercely, but he does uncover the mark and hold it out for her to see.

"'Jade,'" she reads aloud, and frowns, though Luke has the strange sense she's relieved — glad it isn't a local kid she disapproves of, maybe. "I don't think I've ever met a Jade. Pretty enough name, though."

"It might be my nemesis," Luke protests, although privately he also thinks it's a pretty name and has been spending a lot of time imagining what someone called Jade might look like.

Beru snorts. "Oh, of course," she says, "that's probably it. You lead such an adventurous lifestyle, I'm sure you have a nemesis I've never heard of."

"I just said it _could_ be," Luke says, laughing. "It's possible. In theory. You never know."

"Well, that at least I can agree with," Beru says with a smile, and shoos him off to help Owen in the workshop.

His friends notice it, too, over the next week. Most of them already have one wrist marked, a mix of right and left, a few names they recognize but mostly unfamiliar ones; now that Luke is one of them, he's inducted into a world of rumor and speculation that he's amazed he didn't notice going on around him before. Tank insists that the first wrist-mark to appear is always the soulmate; Camie holds that the left wrist is always the soulmate, and the right the enemy, although she thinks it might switch if you're left-handed; Deak swears research has proven that whichever name shows up in bigger letters is the enemy, and almost comes to blows with Biggs when he scoffs and says "Idiot, that just means it's the _shorter_ one."

Luke listens to all of these theories with interest and concludes, though he doesn't say it out loud, that they're all so much bantha dung — if there were a pattern that simple, surely everyone would be able to agree on what it was. Unfortunately, that's not much help with the mystery of whose name, exactly, is on his wrist.

He does spend a lot of time thinking about it, those first few months. The name itself doesn't offer him many clues; Jade could be a first name or a family name, a woman's name or a man's. He develops a half-dozen theories, envisioning Jade as friend or lover or foe in battle, and chooses carefully which ones to share with which of his friends (and which to keep firmly to himself).

With Windy, who he's been trying to make time with, he sticks to the idea that Jade will be an enemy. "Probably a real tough bounty hunter," he theorizes one afternoon when they're doing schoolwork together, leaning back in his chair to stare up at the toy ships hanging from Windy's ceiling. "Jade's a kind of stone, right? So it's probably a nickname, the kind of thing you'd pick to make yourself sound hard."

"What would a bounty hunter come after _you_ for?" Windy asks, clearly not buying it.

"Uh," Luke says, and hastily changes the subject back to Galactic History. Evidently the bounty-hunter theory needs a little more work.

A few days later, he's under his landspeeder, tearing the repulsor manifold out and replacing it with a slightly-newer one he scavenged from a junked delivery speeder, when Biggs, who's been handing him tools and offering moral support in the form of insults, says, "You know, it's not even always a name. Sometimes it's just descriptive."

"Yeah?" Luke grunts, adjusting his grip on the hydrospanner to reach a tricky bolt. "Well, Jade means 'green,' right? So maybe it's an alien girl with green skin." He pauses as a pleasant thought strikes him. "Maybe she's a Twi'lek girl. A dancer."

"Maybe she's a Gamorrean," Biggs says cheerfully. Luke abandons the stuck bolt and rolls out from under the landspeeder to kick him in the shin.

The theory he thinks is most likely is one of the ones he keeps to himself, mostly just because it's not very interesting: soulmate or enemy, Jade must be someone he'll meet at the Imperial Academy. A fellow pilot candidate, a cadet in the naval officer corps, maybe just a local he'll meet in a tapcafe near campus — whoever they are, they don't seem to be hanging around in his neighborhood, and the Academy is the only route off-planet Luke can see, so the Academy it must be.

He redoubles his efforts to convince Owen to let him go, the sooner the better — of course, in theory a wrist-mark is someone you're _fated_ to meet, it's not as if he could actually miss Jade by getting the timing wrong, but he's anxious about it all the same.

* * *

The markings on his right wrist come in when he's seventeen, or start to. They shift and blur from week to week, sometimes even from day to day, but never quite settle down into anything readable. Sometimes he thinks he can make out a letter or two — there's a downward slash that might be part of a _resh_ , a pair of parallel lines that might be an _aurek_ — but never a whole name, and usually whatever he thinks he sees is gone within a week.

They shift so constantly, the month after he leaves Tatooine, that he can actually see the lines moving as he watches. He barely sleeps for the first few days, sitting up to watch the shifting letters, sure that this will be his enemy's name — that at any moment he'll learn the name of the Imperial officer who led the raid on the homestead, or his superior who ordered it, or... suddenly there are a lot of possibilities.

It never happens. After a month or two, the markings settle back to the way they were before, still unreadable but more or less stable.

* * *

He didn't realize, back on Tatooine, what an oddity it was — a whole planet where people, adult people whose wrists have been marked for years or decades, walk around with them uncovered, right out where anyone could read them. Among his new friends in the Rebellion, the idea seems to be considered somewhere between 'charmingly innocent' and 'hilariously backwards'. In the rest of the galaxy, apparently, nearly everyone wears cuffs or bands that cover the names on their wrists, or has them covered more permanently — he meets more than a few people who have thick black bands tattooed around their wrists, especially those who've spent their lives in the public eye. (Leia's wrists are covered in curling vines and flowers, a work of art so expertly designed you could almost believe the placement was a coincidence.)

Eventually Luke buys a pair of fabric cuffs, too, for the sake of fitting in. It doesn't really matter, after all; he knows the name he's listening for, every time he's introduced to someone new.

Well. He knows one name, anyway. _Jade_ is still clear as day on his left wrist, but the markings on his right are still a bit of a puzzle — he's pretty certain now that there's an _aurek_ in there, that seems consistent, but the rest of the markings still seem to shift and fade around it, and he's never been able to make out any other letters.

For the first few weeks after putting on the cuffs, he checks all the time, pulling the fabric aside just in case something's changed; it takes some getting used to, not being able to see it anytime he glances down. It never gets any clearer, though, and over time he does get used to it — and used to the idea that it isn't changing anytime soon.

It's a bit of a shock when he raises his canteen to his mouth one day on Dagobah, glances down to where he's rolled up his sleeve past the markings — he hasn't been wearing the cuffs, it's too miserably humid — and sees they've suddenly resolved into clear, dark letters. Four letters, like the left wrist: _Mern-aurek-resh-aurek — MARA_.

He's unfocused during the rest of the day's training, turning the name over in his mind. He's pretty certain he's never met anyone named Mara, but the name feels oddly familiar all the same, and he's trying to meditate but mostly racking his brain — a pilot in a different wing, maybe? A friend of a friend? A name he's caught in a Holonet broadcast, even? — when Yoda raps him on the shoulder with his cane and says sharply, "Distracted, you are."

"I'm sorry," Luke says with a sigh, opening his eyes and uncrossing his legs to stretch. "You're right, Master Yoda, my thoughts were... elsewhere."

Yoda frowns up at him for a while. "You seek answers in the wrong place," he says finally. "Look to the Force."

Luke shakes his head, feeling his cheeks flush. "I'm just trying to remember something," he insists. "It's nothing important."

"Hmm," Yoda says, somehow imbuing the sound with skepticism. "In that case, easy it will be to focus on your meditation this time."

"Yes, Master Yoda," Luke says, obediently settling back into position and closing his eyes. He takes a deep breath, tries to put the whole question of names and fates and wrist-marks out of his mind, and stretches out to the Force.

"And perhaps," Yoda says quietly, just as he's getting settled, "the Force may offer some insight, even on a matter so unimportant. Nothing is beneath the notice of the Force."

The Force doesn't offer him much wisdom on the subject, that day or over the next few weeks. It does drift into his mind sometimes — as he gets more practiced in Jedi meditation techniques, he learns not to fight the direction of his thoughts — but as with most subjects, he sees nothing particularly useful; a flash of dark green foliage, or a rushing flow of water, but never anything that he recognizes or can make sense of.

* * *

He's barely gotten used to _Mara_ when he loses it. It doesn't occur to him at first, of course, in the chaos of pain and shock and disbelief, and even if he did think of it, he couldn't confirm it; he can't make himself look at the stump of his wrist without his stomach turning. On the hospital ship, though, once the medics have dosed him with something and the wound's been cleaned up a little, he's able to see that Vader's lightsaber struck just high enough to take off the letters.

To take most of them off, anyway. The cut isn't perfectly straight, and at the inside of his wrist, a few marks are still visible — not enough to be readable, or even to pick out one letter, really, but enough to tell that there once was something there.

It looks very strange, once the prosthetic is put on: three little disconnected dashes of black, like a botched tattoo, cut off abruptly where the synthetic skin meets real flesh. It unnerves him to look at it, the way it makes the seam obvious, makes it impossible to pretend the hand is real, as natural as it may look.

He hopes it isn't as noticeable to anyone else, but that hope is dashed as soon as his pilot friends start dropping by the recovery ward to visit him. Most of them just glance at the seam, grimace, and then look away and try not to mention it; a few, especially those with old injuries of their own, shake their heads and comment, not on how strange the cut-off letters look but on how they really show up the last few years' advancements, the break between real flesh and synthetic skin nearly invisible already.

A few of the Rogues stop by together; Wes Janson leans in to look at the marks and nods solemnly, and for a moment Luke thinks he's going to be one of that latter group, say something complimentary about the medical staff's work. Instead he says, "You know, this is really a golden opportunity as far as picking up girls."

"Oh no," Hobbie says.

"He _swore_ he wasn't going to do this," Tycho adds, grabbing Janson by the elbow and trying, with limited success, to drag him toward the door.

"I'm not _recommending_ it," Janson protests, "I'm just saying, there is a potential upside here and I assume I'm the first person with the quick wits to think of it."

"Sounds like a dangerous game to me," Luke says. "Anyway, wouldn't she know right away it wasn't true? I mean, if hers doesn't say my name..."

"You know what, I fully admit, I did not think of that."

Hobbie shoulders his way in front of Janson, grabbing him by the elbows and forcibly turning him toward the door. "I keep telling you, you gotta workshop these ideas a little more. Anyway—" he looks back toward Luke— "we'll get out of your hair. Good to have you back, though."

"And, again, very sorry about..." Tycho shrugs, then makes a sweeping gesture at Janson. "Him. In his entirety."

Leia seems unnerved by it, too, or maybe she's just picking up his own discomfort; she reassures him several times, unprompted, that " _You_ know what it said — that's what matters, anyway," and once does ask if he's considered a tattoo, covering the wrist as if the whole mark were still there.

"With my luck, the ink wouldn't take on this stuff," Luke answers, flexing his fingers and watching how the synth-skin stretches around the knuckles — it doesn't move quite the same as natural skin.

Leia nods at that, even musters a little laugh, though Luke notices that, maybe unconsciously, she's running a finger over her own wrist tattoos, tracing the curling vines.

Lando doesn't mention it at all, even as he becomes one of Luke's most frequent visitors — he tells outrageous stories, they play cards, and once or twice Luke does catch his gaze drifting toward his wrist, but he never says a word about it. After a few weeks, though, he drops by with a pair of black leather gloves, soft and worn-in-looking, long enough to cover the cut-off wrist-mark entirely and cut slim enough to tuck under the sleeve of a jacket.

"Thought you might like them," is the only explanation he offers.

"I do," Luke says with a grin, pulling them on and stretching his hands; they fit beautifully, and the leather is butter-soft, maybe the nicest thing he's ever owned. "Thank you."

* * *

Luke's hardly thought about either name in years. He'd still know them if he heard them, of course, but since the war he's come to some new ideas about fate and destiny, about trying to make sense of the future. _Always in motion is the future_ — Yoda hadn't been talking about the wrist-marks, but he hadn't exactly kept his skepticism about them secret, either, and what Luke's learned about the Force since then makes him a little skeptical, too. (It does, he thinks, probably explain why _Mara_ stayed unclear for so long; fate gets strange when the Force is involved.)

For some reason, though, they've been on his mind recently, and he's not surprised when he wakes with a dim memory of the same old visual flashes — dark jungle foliage, rushing water, an archway of carved stone. As usual, nothing he can make much sense of.

It dawns on him, slowly, that he's not sure where he is. He's still in his flightsuit, lying on a bed in a small room, a window open on the opposite wall — he can see the tops of trees outside, and something registers as familiar about them. Maybe he's been here before. He lifts his head cautiously, starts to sit up—

"Finally awake, are you?" a woman's voice says from one side. Luke turns, startled — there's no way he could have missed sensing another person in the room, the voice must be coming from a comm unit left open to keep an eye on him.

But it isn't. There's someone there, a woman about his own age, with brilliant red-gold hair. Her legs are casually crossed, and there's a wicked-looking blaster in her lap — not in her hand, which he cautiously notes as a good sign, but not far out of reach, either. Her wrists, he notices, are tattooed, and must have been done when she was very young; the dark ink is faded almost to blue.

He casts his mind back, tries again to remember how he got here. Of course — the X-wing's blown hyperdrive, the _Wild Karrde_ 's fortuitous appearance. The stun bolt from behind.

The name Karrde gave, the impossible combination of names, for the member of his crew who'd insisted they stop.

Luke looks at her again, feeling his heartrate pick up speed. There's something familiar in the way she drapes her arms over the arms of the chair, in the set of her jaw — but then, she would _feel_ familiar, wouldn't she? In some way, in some part of him, he's known her since he was fourteen.

"Don't tell me," he says, hoarsely, keeping his voice as steady as he can. "Let me guess. You're Mara Jade."

**Author's Note:**

> [The post that inspired this fic](http://chekhovsgum.tumblr.com/post/139383734894/cindymoon-im-so-tired-of-the-au-where-your), by tumblr user chekhovsgum (riffing on an idea by cindymoon)


End file.
